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MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

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Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#81

Post by austinheap »

thetinguy wrote: post #76
austinheap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m unaware of any Core Banking Systems (CBS) that runs on a cloud provider with the exception being Finastra (Azure). Other parts of retail banking stacks? Sure. Not their cores.

The major cloud providers all aim for 99.999% uptime. Keep in mind that 99.99% uptime means ~4 minutes of downtime a month. I think there are other reasons that banks may not want or have the ability to run their core services on the cloud.

The vast majority of retail banking institutions do not run their core. They outsource it to the major core vendors to ‘protect themselves from themselves’.

It’s atypical motivation but one of the few verticals I know of where the cloud is largely out of the equation.

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#82

Post by emodendroket »

walrus01 wrote: post #56
aynsof wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think locally managed systems are immune to outages? Or that governments are capable of resourcing their teams sufficiently to do a better job at availability than Microsoft, Google, or Amazon?

Your comment is a fine example of the standard rhetoric from the 'move everything to the cloud' marketing people, but perhaps organizations should consider that they don't have to go with one cloud provider as a single point of failure. It's the lazy way of abstracting away responsibility and blame to some other party, and in my experience often does not result in better availability than a properly implemented "belt…

Or it’s borne of experience of doing it oneself being much less reliable than cloud providers even accounting for these rare outages.

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#84

Post by medium_burrito »

thetinguy wrote: post #76
austinheap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m unaware of any Core Banking Systems (CBS) that runs on a cloud provider with the exception being Finastra (Azure). Other parts of retail banking stacks? Sure. Not their cores.

The major cloud providers all aim for 99.999% uptime. Keep in mind that 99.99% uptime means ~4 minutes of downtime a month. I think there are other reasons that banks may not want or have the ability to run their core services on the cloud.

Let's be honest, it's Azure. The only reason you choose it is because either you compete with Amazon in some way, or you hate your infrastructure engineers, or don't know better.

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#85

Post by emodendroket »

michaelmcmillan wrote: post #53

Ironically Azure tweeted a guide on how to protect your DNS against unwanted changes only 3 hours before everything blew up: https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1377697274378260489 You can't make this stuff up.

If they would have published it a bit earlier this whole problem could have been avoided.

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#86

Post by emodendroket »

medium_burrito wrote: post #84
thetinguy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major cloud providers all aim for 99.999% uptime. Keep in mind that 99.99% uptime means ~4 minutes of downtime a month. I think there are other reasons that banks may not want or have the ability to run their core services on the cloud.

Let's be honest, it's Azure. The only reason you choose it is because either you compete with Amazon in some way, or you hate your infrastructure engineers, or don't know better.

Quite a few businesses are still simply more comfortable with any idea if Microsoft does it than otherwise.

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#87

Post by 908B64B197 »

fartcannon wrote: post #42
smitop wrote: post #34

Looks like this took down the national emergency alert system in Canada. I'm registered as an alert LMD (last mile distributor), and Pelmorex (corporation running the system) just emailed me to say "Please note that currently there is an unexpected significant outage on Microsoft Azure that is affecting the availability of the NAADS system and other clients globally. The NAAD System feeds are currently not accessible…

And here it is, the main problem with outsourcing critical infrastructure. Remote server providers like Microsoft Azure should at most be used as twins/redundant systems to a locally managed system. Governments of the world: pay your IT people more money to prevent brain drain.

They would need to triple the salaries for new grads to make it on par with Microsoft. Junior employees over there make around 45K USD[0], compare to Microsoft 110K[1]. Not including bonuses and stock, of course.

I don't think they could build infrastructure even if they wanted to.

[0] https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/agreements-conventions/view-visual... [1] https://www.levels.fyi/company/Microsoft/salaries/Software-E...

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#88

Post by [deleted] »

beebob wrote: post #78
semicolon_storm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Major worldwide outages for AAD, CosmosDB, and now DNS in just the past few months so it’s definitely not just you. Maybe Microsoft should invest less in their shiny new AI/ML platforms and more into stability of their core services.

I'd like to second this. From where I'm sitting it feels like Microsoft is prioritizing marketing more than engineering. It seems like most larger customers that use Azure do so because management got shiny presentations from Microsoft and now it's their "strategical partner". A lot of overselling with huge discounts gets them their in. Already seen this at multiple companies. Azure is a nice platform for your Window…

[deleted]

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#89

Post by roody15 »

thetinguy wrote: post #76
austinheap wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m unaware of any Core Banking Systems (CBS) that runs on a cloud provider with the exception being Finastra (Azure). Other parts of retail banking stacks? Sure. Not their cores.

The major cloud providers all aim for 99.999% uptime. Keep in mind that 99.99% uptime means ~4 minutes of downtime a month. I think there are other reasons that banks may not want or have the ability to run their core services on the cloud.

Aim.. Google for sure doesn’t come close to this for uptime. Microsoft as well.

Re: MS Azure down: An emerging issue is being investigated

#90

Post by beebob »

medium_burrito wrote: post #84
thetinguy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major cloud providers all aim for 99.999% uptime. Keep in mind that 99.99% uptime means ~4 minutes of downtime a month. I think there are other reasons that banks may not want or have the ability to run their core services on the cloud.

Let's be honest, it's Azure. The only reason you choose it is because either you compete with Amazon in some way, or you hate your infrastructure engineers, or don't know better.

From what I’ve seen up until now it’s often the last option. I’ve seen comparisons between the major cloud providers, but those have often been on the level of “I can boot a VM with x cpu on provider y and z”. With these kind of comparisons a major deciding factor then is discounts. And that’s an area Microsoft excels at.
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